Beijing – This ancient metropolis has long enjoyed iconic structures, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Temple of Heaven.
Now it has the Bird’s Nest, the Water Cube and the Egg.
China’s capital, riding the fortunes of boundless economic growth and enjoying the international spotlight as it prepares to host the 2008 Olympics, is getting a face-lift.
When 4 billion TV viewers tune in to the Olympics next year, they will see a nation striving for status through a new generation of gleaming, avant-garde buildings in all shapes and sizes, many designed by some of the world’s star architects.
The government is spending about $40 billion on 14 new venues and massive infrastructure upgrades for the Olympics, a spending spree unmatched by any previous host city and more than double the $16 billion Greece spent to prepare Athens for the 2004 Summer Games.
The steel-and-concrete upheaval is the latest transformation of a city that has experienced destruction and renewal by successive empires.
Beijing, perched on a great plain in northern China, has been a cultural and political center since the Mongol occupation in the 13th century.
Marco Polo marveled at the rich and highly developed Beijing-based empire of Kublai Khan, grandson of Ghengis Khan. In the early 15th century, the Ming dynasty created Beijing’s Forbidden City and its lasting classic architecture.
The majestic city survived attacks by foreign powers and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution under Mao Tse-Tung.
The once-walled city now has a skyline of construction cranes and is filled with churning dust as glass towers rise up from the congested streets. Designer buildings look like giant dominoes, layered cakes or even upside down boats in a row, each trying to make a statement that Beijing has arrived as a great modern metropolis.
In the rush to create a new Beijing – with expanded roads, new subway lines and an upscale downtown – hundreds of old courtyard houses in the city’s once-pervasive single-story “hutong” neighhorhoods have been demolished.
“Sometimes we get lost in the city because it is changing so fast,” said Zhang Lixin, director of the Beijing Municipal City Planning Commission. “Not only is the image of the city changing, but also the thinking of the people living here.”
Olympics preparation is adding to an around-the- clock building boom.
Beijing’s Olympic Green, designed by U.S.-based Sasaki Associates, will feature the 91,000-seat National Stadium designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. The tangle of twiglike steel, nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, dwarfs everything around it.
More than 5,000 workers – many of whom are migrants – weld and hammer day and night on the $386 million stadium. Though it’s not expected to be completed until early next year, the site already has become a tourist attraction. Buses loaded with camera-toting foreigners pull up to the site daily.
Next door is the National Aquatics Center, known as the Water Cube because it looks like a giant ice cube covered with bubbles. The $125 million water sports venue will seat 11,000 spectators.
Even without Olympics projects, though, the city is undergoing a massive construction makeover along with the rest of eastern, coastal China. It has been estimated that as much as half of the world’s concrete is being poured into China construction projects, and as much as a third of global steel production is going to high-rises in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities across the nation.
Visitors to the Egg, a performing-arts center designed by French architect Paul Andreu and officially called the National Grand Theater, must pass under a giant moat. The structure, expected to open in September, rubs against the 600-year-old Forbidden City.
This quick-changing architectural landscape, though, is now facing a great wall of criticism.
Leading academics have attacked the safety and design of some of the structures designed by Westerners that clash with the old-style flying eaves and rigid geometrical architecture of Beijing.
The government, meanwhile, appears to be rethinking its embrace of foreign architects.
Earlier this year, several government bodies issued new rules for public buildings that seem to favor local designers.
